OSDL and the kernel community

OSDL and the kernel community

Often, the information in a GPL device driver isn't really that much more than the information you could get by reverse engineering using a bus analyzer, a closed device driver, and a program written to exercise the functionality. The driver discloses a series of interactions that cause the hardware to do a particular known set of things, but not necessarily why you know it will work or how you might make it do something different. And, of course, the comments will tend to reference the spec, so someone who's signed the NDA can tell why the code is right (or if it's wrong), but someone without the spec doesn't get much out of it. Of course, people who don't have the spec could try to reconstruct it be modifying the driver slightly in various ways and seeing what happens, but that's prohibitively time-consuming compared to having a document that states the correct generalizations. So a number of companies offer NDAs that allow writing free drivers based on the specs, and the new thing is just that OSDL can act as an intermediary on the agreements, rather than individual developers having to contact manufacturers.